


The Way Back Home

by dontbeeshy



Category: The Maze Runner (Movies), The Maze Runner Series - All Media Types, The Maze Runner Series - James Dashner
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Minho is a Good Friend (Maze Runner), Newt Lives (Maze Runner), Post-Canon Fix-It, dont ask me how they survive idk, he's honestly the best, i just need people to be happy, its 2am i should be sleeping, look i dont know how to tag okay, technically
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-25
Updated: 2021-02-24
Packaged: 2021-03-15 16:55:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29687043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dontbeeshy/pseuds/dontbeeshy
Summary: How do you cope with losing the two people you care about most in the world?Thomas struggles to find happiness in Safe Haven. He finds solace in writing letters to Newt. But what he doesn't know is that, somewhere across the sea, two unlikely friends are fighting for their survival and are trying to find their way to Pardise.
Relationships: Newt/Thomas (Maze Runner)
Comments: 14
Kudos: 30





	The Way Back Home

**Author's Note:**

> quick note to say this is based on the movie canon. enjoy ~  
> title from the song by coeur de pirate.

Mornings were both a blessing and a curse.

The first few seconds after waking up, Thomas wouldn’t remember anything of what had happened. He would only hear the sound of the waves crashing on the shore and smell the salty air that came with them. He would see the sunlight coming through the cracks of the hut and warming up the duvet he was sleeping on. He would hear voices coming from outside. Laughters, sometimes. For a few seconds, there was only bliss.

Then it would all come back to him at once. The Last City going up in flames. Newt dying in his arms. Teresa falling to her death. It would play on loop in his head like a broken record. Nothing had gone according to plan, and on top of that, after all the sacrifices he had made, he didn’t even have the cure. He was so sure that Teresa would make it that he hadn’t bothered taking it from her, and it had disappeared into flames with her. Going back to her had been for nothing.

The first morning in Safe Haven hadn’t been that bad. He had managed to pull it off. His brain hadn’t had the time to process everything yet. The second morning was when it all came crashing down. He woke up and he lost it. It started with a soft, silent sob, and it got worse as each memory kicked in. Soon he was crying his heart out on his pillow. As far as he could remember, he had never cried that much. He cried until his eyes ran out of tears, until his entire body went numb, until his breathing almost stopped. For a moment, he thought he was going to die from crying. He wasn’t sure it was possible, to die from crying, but if it were, he was nearing it. Then he laid there, in a pool of his own tears, feeling like his soul had left his body and he was nothing more than an empty shell. His vision had gone blurry and there was a white noise coming through both his ears. He couldn’t move anymore, not even a finger, no matter how hard he tried. Maybe he really had died, he thought, from crying, like an idiot. 

When he finally made it out of bed, it was already dusk. All the other survivors were gathered around the fire, eating dinner and talking about their day. They all looked tired but cheerful, like one does after travelling all day long and finally reaching their destination. They could almost be mistaken for a group of kids on a camping trip. It was a heartwarming picture.

Thomas sat next to Minho without a word and declined any food he was offered. He looked at the people around him. On a bench to his left, he saw Brenda telling what seemed to be a rather intense story to Gally and Frypan, judging from the big gestures she was making while speaking. On his right, he recognised Sonya and Harriet, cuddling against a rock and laughing to a joke Aris had just told them. All around there were kids he didn’t even know but who owed him their lives. All of them made so much noise that he barely heard it when Minho started talking to him. 

“I let you cry it out because you needed it.” Minho said, staring at the fire. “But this can’t happen again. If you don’t snap out of it now, you never will. And you can’t let that happen. You can’t let it eat you alive. We need you here.” He paused and looked right into Thomas’ eyes. “ _I_ need you here, okay?” He added, his voice breaking on the last word.

Thomas had never seen Minho so vulnerable. Despite all the things the boy had gone through, he had never let his emotions take over like this. Thomas knew he wasn’t the only one who had been broken by what had happened, but he hadn’t realised how utterly shattered Minho was. The other boy was probably blaming himself for everything, for not being able to save Newt again like he had before. Thomas was now the closest thing Minho had to Newt, and so was Minho to him. It was the two of them now. He couldn’t let himself sink. He couldn’t do that to his friend. 

“Okay.” he simply answered. And that time around, when he was asked if he wanted to eat something, he nodded. 

* * *

The morning after, it all happened again. The waves, the sunlight, the voices. The bliss. The flames, the death, the horror. 

He got up and left the hut.

He kept himself busy by any means, trying to focus on anything but his memories of the past few days. There were many things he still couldn’t do because of his wound, but what he could do he did. 

He went to the gardens and helped Sonya attend them. She spent the whole time talking, explaining to him how to grow different crops and what their nutritive values were and how they could be cooked. It surprised him. He didn’t know her much but he hadn’t expected her to be so talkative. She asked him what his favourite fruit was and proceeded to give him a small basket full of apples. “I’m not supposed to do that, so don’t tell anyone. It’s our little secret.” She said with a warm yet mischievous smile that reminded him of Newt’s. 

He went to the kitchens and helped Frypan prepare dinner. He was surprised that the other boy let him stay since he usually refused any help when it came to cooking. Thomas chopped the vegetables he had picked up earlier into slices and pieces, following Frypan’s directions. He was quite slow at first, not knowing how to use a kitchen knife properly, but he eventually got the hang of it.

“I’m making your favourite.” Fry told him when he asked what they were actually cooking. “Since you’re eating again.” 

He stayed there a few hours until the sun set. Then he walked all around camp, taking the place in. His new home. His first home, in many ways. It felt weird to have a place to call home, the good kind of weird. He could get used to it.

His steps eventually led him to the beach, where the monolith covered with names stood tall. Minho had brought him there after he had first woken up. Only a few names had been carved in back then. Now there was almost no room left. Chuck’s name had been added, by Gally he figured. He also saw Winston’s in what he recognised to be Frypan’s carving. And then there was Newt’s. It was here, at eye level. Four little letters that took up so much space. He let his fingers run over each letter one by one, as if he were writing them himself.

“I figured he deserved to have the top spot.” Minho’s voice said beside him. Thomas hadn’t even heard the other boy walking up to him. “He would have hated being the center of attention like that, but he deserves it.” 

They stood there in silence, staring at Newt’s name. Thomas had thought it would wreck him to see his name on the stone, but it turned out to be quite the opposite. It lifted a weight off his shoulders. It was proof that the boy had existed, and that he would never be forgotten. Years from now, when all of them would be gone and new generations would live in Safe Haven, they would know that there was once a boy named Newt who gave his life for them to be free. 

Thomas’ gaze eventually wandered to one of the remaining empty spots, just next to Newt’s. It was barely big enough to fit a name.

“I thought you would want to put her name up there, so I saved you some room. And trust me, it wasn’t easy. A lot of people here think she doesn’t deserve it.” By the tone of his voice, Thomas could tell that Minho was one of those people. “But she was your friend, or whatever, and you have the right to mourn her too.” 

He handed Thomas the pick he was holding as if it were a sacred object. 

“Dinner will be ready soon. It’s your favourite so don’t be late.” 

As Minho walked away, Thomas realised he had no idea what his favourite dish was. 

* * *

After dinner, Thomas went straight to bed. He laid on his bunk in the hut he shared with the other Gladers. They all knew there were enough huts for each of them to have their own, but none of them felt like sleeping by themselves. They couldn’t even remember ever sleeping alone. And anyway, there wasn’t a night when one of them wouldn’t wake up from a nightmare, and simply having the others around would calm them down.

He laid there and absentmindedly played with his necklace, the little capsule on a string Newt had given him. He had read the letter multiple times already, so many times he was sure that by now he could recite it by heart. He was glad that, despite everything, there was still something that only belonged to him and Newt. Those words, his last words in a way, were all he had left from his best friend, and no one could take that part of Newt away from him. Not WCKD, not the Flare, no one. 

And of course, he felt honoured. Honoured that, in his last moments, the one thing Newt worried about was Thomas. That despite being slowly overtaken by a virus he knew would kill him, he sat down and wrote a letter to Thomas to make his friend feel better about his death. That’s how selfless Newt was. That’s how much Newt cared about him, and Thomas hoped his friend knew that he cared about him just as much.

He had thought about it for a while, what he would have written to Newt if the roles were reversed, if he had been the one turning into a crank. He wasn’t as good with words as Newt was, so it would have probably been a mess, he thought. There were a million things he would have wanted to tell him.

And maybe that was exactly what he needed to do to get better.

Without a second thought, he stormed out of the hut and made his way to the other side of the camp. He sneaked into the cabin that served as an office and picked up the first notepad he found as well as a few pencils, hoping no one would notice they were missing. As people were slowly leaving the bonfire to go to bed, he made his way to the beach. Minho gave him a confused look but didn’t say anything, which Thomas was thankful for.

He walked up and down the coastline, gathering his thoughts. It was hard to find the right words, harder than he had thought. He wasn’t one to do this kind of thing usually. He was too impulsive, too straight-forward. He just couldn’t think straight.

At some point, he just stopped walking and looked up at the stars. They shone brighter here than they did back in the Scorch, he realised. He wished Newt could see them. 

He sat on the sand in front of the monolith, stared at Newt’s name for a few minutes; and he started writing. 

* * *

This was not what Newt had expected heaven to look like.

In his mind, heaven wasn’t supposed to be a cold place that smelled of ashes and chemicals. He had expected the light to be bright though, and it was. Blinding, even. But it wasn’t supposed to look _that_ artificial. Also it wasn’t supposed to make the static sound of a neon light. 

That’s when he realised he probably wasn’t in heaven. He had died though. He was pretty sure of it. He had felt himself dying. It had been a soothing feeling after all the pain he had endured. He had died; there was no doubt about it.

But right now, he was definitely not dead. 

He realised he was lying on a bed, so he tried to get up, but a throbbing pain stopped him right away. He looked down and noticed that the knife wasn’t poking out of his chest anymore, yet he had no memory of ever pulling it out. He tried getting up again, but the pain was too strong and he fell back into bed. He was gathering his strength to try for the third time when a voice came from his left side. 

“Don’t. You’re just gonna make it worse.” 

His head snapped, and sitting next to him on a steel chair was the last person he had expected to see again. 

“Teresa?” he mumbled.

“Don’t look so happy to see me.” the girl smirked. 

He gaped at her for a while, for he could barely recognise her. The girl was scrawny, and it seemed that every bone in her body was trying to break its way out of her skin. She had to have lost at least ten pounds since the last time he saw her. The dark circles under her eyes only made her look more skeletic, and it seemed she hadn’t slept in days. But the most striking difference was her face. A good third of it, from her left eye to her ear and all the way down her cheek, was covered in leathery scar tissue, and so was her left arm. _She’s been in a fire,_ he immediately figured. 

“What happened to you?”

She scoffed. “Of course you would ask about me even though you’re literally the one lying in a hospital bed.” 

So it was a hospital. Definitely not heaven. Only now he noticed all the beeping machines around him, some of them plugged to his body by various tubes. He had no idea what any of them were for. He got the sudden urge to rip them off but Teresa was faster than him.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you. They’re sort of the only thing keeping you alive right now.” 

He stared at her with pleading eyes. “Teresa, what _happened_?”

“What’s the last thing you remember?” 

Newt searched through his memories, but they were all too blurry and incoherent. “I was fighting with myself...and with Tommy. I didn’t hurt him, did I?” Teresa shook her head slowly, though she remembered Thomas being injured when he came to her. “I just...stabbed myself with the knife, so I wouldn’t stab him. We fell to the ground. I don’t remember anything after that.”

“Do you remember hearing me on the speakers?”

He simply shook his head.

Teresa was looking out the window, gazing at the remains of the city. The place looked like a warzone. There was nothing left of what she had once called home. It had all disappeared in a matter of a few hours.

She glanced down at her hands. Her nails were bitten to the core and she was mechanically picking at the skin around them

“He was the cure.” She finally said. “I mean, his blood. The cure was in Thomas’ blood all along.”

Newt scoffed. Of course, fate had a twisted sense of humour. A chuckle escaped his throat and echoed in the empty hospital. When it died down, he looked back at Teresa who was still staring at her bitten fingers. 

“So, are you gonna tell me what happened or do I have to beg?” 

She took a deep breath and told him the whole story, about making the cure and fighting Janson, making it to the roof, pushing Thomas to the Berg and letting herself be engulfed by the crumbling building. She didn’t look at him once. 

“But, how did you survive the fall?”

“How did you survive jumping off the tower?”

_The water_ , he remembered. 

“It was dumb luck, really. Trust me, I couldn't quite believe it myself. It’s a good thing my body reacted faster than my mind and swam to the surface or I would have just drowned like an idiot.” 

She chuckled saying that, probably out of nervosity. 

“I struggled my way out of the water and I collapsed on the ground. I was hurting everywhere. My head was pounding so bad I genuinely thought it was going to explode, you know? It was unbearable, Newt. It was like being stung by Grievers all over the body at once. And between the water and the smoke, it was simply impossible to breathe. I choked on every breath I took. For a moment, I wish I hadn’t made it.”

Newt’s heart shattered at her words. He had no reason to like the girl; hell, he had plenty of reasons to hate her. But he couldn’t not feel for her. He knew what it was like to hurt so much you just wish it would end, to lose all hope, and he wouldn’t wish that to anyone, not even to his worst enemy. He saw her picking at her nails had got more and more virulent as she spoke, so he carefully took one of her hands into his. She looked up at him and gave him a shy smile as to thank him. He gave her hand a gentle squeeze. 

“But then something in me kicked in again. Survival instinct, I guess. I knew I couldn’t stay here. I tried to get as far away from the tower as I could. At this point I couldn’t even use my legs anymore, so I ended up crawling my way out of this hell. And that’s when I saw you. I don’t even know why, but I instinctively made my way to you. Tom had told me it was too late, that you were gone, so it made no sense for me to go back to you. But I did. And he was right, you definitely looked dead. I can understand why he thought you were. You weren’t breathing, and I checked your pulse without expecting to find any.”

She paused briefly. Newt was holding his breath

“But it was there. It was weak. I almost missed it. But you still had a pulse. You were alive, barely but still. I couldn’t leave you here to die. Something in my mind snapped. I knew I had to keep you alive at any cost. And somehow it gave me the strength to stand and I dragged you here. It took me so long, it seemed like hours. I checked your pulse every couple minutes. I was so scared you were going to die on me.”

A couple tears went rolling down her cheeks, and Newt squeezed her hand again.

“How long have I been out?” he asked. 

“It’s been five weeks.”

“ _Five_ _weeks_?” 

“Thirty-seven days exactly. You’re lucky this place has so much equipment and I have basic medical training or you’d probably have died within hours.”

The boy was baffled. He thought he had been unconscious for a couple days only. Five weeks was such a long time, and she had spent that whole time taking care of him, feeding him the best she could, attending to his wound, giving him all the medicine she could find, without even knowing if he was ever going to wake up. He couldn’t stand her and she knew it, yet she had pretty much sacrificed her own health for his. He had no idea how to feel about that. 

He looked down at his chest again. “I guess you’re the one who took the knife out too.”

“It was the hardest part. I actually had no idea of how to do it without killing you in the process.” she admitted. “Good thing this hospital is full of training books.”

He shuddered at the thought. “I hope I was a good training subject then.” he joked.

“Your lung was punctured. The wound was pretty deep and you lost a lot of blood. I did what I could. I’m not sure how functional it is now, though. I couldn’t save much of it. All I could do was prevent it from getting infected.” 

He could hear the guilt in her voice. She was probably beating herself up over this, even though she had done more than anybody else could have. 

“Good thing I have a second one, right?” he joked again, hoping to lighten the atmosphere.

She snorted with a smile. “Yeah. By the way, since you’ve been lying here for weeks, I also took that opportunity to do something for your leg.” 

Newt’s eyebrows raised in surprise. He hadn’t even bothered to look at the rest of his body past his chest, but he noticed now that his leg was actually in a cast.

“I heard once that the best way to repair a broken bone that healed badly is to break it again at the same spot. You’d be amazed at how many things can break bones in a hospital.” She giggled. “From what I’ve read, you’ll only need to keep it on for two more weeks.” 

He stared dumbfounded at the cast. He had grown so used to his limp that he never expected his leg to ever get better. “I...I don’t know how to thank you for all this.” 

“You don’t have to. I owed you, really.” 

“I have one last question.” he said.

“I’m listening.” 

“How did you...cure me?” 

She grinned at him, searched inside the breast pocket of her jacket and pulled out a small empty vial. 

“I had the cure, the one I made with Thomas’ blood. He must be cursing himself for letting me keep it. He must think it was all useless.” 

Newt took the vial in his hand. It was crazy, he thought, that such a small object could contain what was in many ways the salvation of humanity. He clenched his fist around it.

“So what’s the plan now ?”

She stood up. “For now, you take your time. You focus on getting better. And once you can walk and run again, we get out of this damn city and we find our way back to the others. Deal?”

Teaming up with Teresa would be weird at first; he still held a grudge against her for betraying them. But now that WCKD was gone, that all of it was behind them, he figured it was time to start from scratch. She had no reason to turn her back on him this time, and after all she had done to keep him alive, he knew he could trust her with his life. They were each other’s best shot at making it out alive.

“Deal.”


End file.
